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More Greek children face risk of poverty

More than a third, or 37.8 percent, of children aged up to 17 in Greece were at risk of poverty and social exclusion in 2015, compared to 28.7 percent in 2010, according to a report published by the European Statistics Agency (Eurostat).

This means that they were living in households with at least one of the following characteristics: at-risk-of-poverty after social transfers (income poverty), severely materially deprived or with very low work intensity.

The increase, which took the total number of children at risk of poverty and social exclusion in Greece to 710,000, is the largest in the European Union since 2010. After Greece, Cyprus was the country with the highest rise since 2010, with 7.1 percent.

At the same time, the EU average dropped from 27.5 percent in 2010 to 26.9 percent in 2015, which corresponds to the alarming figure of approximately 25.26 million children.

Greece was third in the EU in the total number of children faced with such a predicament, behind Romania at 46.8 percent and Bulgaria at 43.7 percent. Hungary was fourth at 36.1 percent, ahead of Spain at 34.4 percent and Italy at 33.5 percent.

The lowest rates were recorded in the Scandinavian countries, with Sweden at 14 percent, ahead of Finland and Denmark, with 14.9 percent and 15.7 percent respectively.